Many call establishment and call completion services are known and commonly used today. Call completion services attempt to facilitate completion of a failed communication attempt. Referring to FIG. 1, call completion services 100 can be broadly categorized into two major categories referred to as Caller in Charge of Call Completion Services (C4S) 101 and Destination in Charge of Call Completion Services (DC3S) 102.
One of the most popular of the DC3S 102 services is the voicemail service 110. Services such as voicemail can fulfill several purposes including call completion purposes. For example, voicemail may be used for the purpose of call completion when a caller leaves a message asking the destination to call the caller back. Voicemail can also be used for the purpose of simply conveying information to the destination.
Short Message Service (SMS) 111 is another service in the DC3S 102 category. Like voicemail service 110, SMS 111 can be used for the purpose of call completion when a caller sends a text message requesting the destination to call the caller back.
Yet another service in the DC3S 102 category is the “missed calls” service 112, which is integrated in the majority of handsets, and allows the destination to view a list of all callers that called while the destination was busy or available but not answering. A similar network service often referred to as the “who-called” or the “missed calls alert” service 113 allows the destination to receive a list of all callers that called while the destination was unavailable.
For services in the C4S 101 category, the caller maintains the responsibility of completing the call, rather than handing the responsibility to the destination. The main advantage of utilizing a service in the C4S 101 category is that the chance of a call actually being completed is much higher than with services in the DC3S 102 category since the caller in most instances is more committed to completing the call. The caller has a higher chance of completing the call with a service in the C4S 101 category since the destination may ignore a caller's initial efforts, be reluctant to accept expenses to complete the call, or otherwise communicate with the caller through a different information channel, such as through e-mail.
Services of the C4S 101 category can be further divided into two categories referred to as the C4S Call Back Services (CBS) 120 and the C4S Notify Back Services (NBS) 121.
Services in the NBS 121 category notify a caller at the first instance the desired destination is available or reachable. The caller may be notified via SMS or via other services, but not via an actual call. One big disadvantage of services in the NBS 121 category is that notifications are non-synchronized. For example, at the time the notification is attempted, the caller may be unreachable. Hence, by the time the caller receives a notification of the availability or reachability of the destination, the notification may already be out of date.
Services in the CBS 120 category actually call back the caller to prompt the caller to complete the call. Services in the CBS 120 category include the Call Back for an initially-UNReachable destination service (CBUNR) 130 and the Call Back for an initially-Non-AnSWering service (CBNASW) 131. These types of services in the CBS 120 category have been disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,081,725 to Ishida, U.S. Pat. No. 6,804,509 to Okon et al., and U.S. patent application Ser. No. 09/930383 by Okon et al. and are all incorporated herein by reference in their entireties.
According to U.S. Provisional Application No. 60/706,224 entitled “Enabling-Disabling Of Voicemail System” by Tal, which is hereby incorporated by reference in its entirety, a user of a telephone service is given the ability to configure call completion services. For example, the destination of incoming calls may enable or disable callback or voicemail services. In another example, the caller of outgoing calls may enable, disable, request or fail to request callback or voicemail services. If callback services are offered, the destination may also be given the option to reversibly enable or disable such services for incoming calls. As for outgoing calls, the caller has the inherent option of accepting or declining a call completion service offering. Nevertheless, a caller may be given an option to explicitly disable callback services for all outgoing calls and thereby bypass offerings for callback services during an outgoing call.
All aforementioned call completion services, however, require a caller wishing to connect with several destinations to activate a call completion service one at a time to each destination. There may be situations in which a caller wishes to plan ahead a series of calls to numerous destinations. For example, when a caller is going on a long drive, the caller may not wish to be distracted with the step of dialing each destination. In such situations, a caller may use a personal assistant or secretary to help the caller schedule outgoing calls. The use of personal assistants and secretaries for this function is common among high-ranking managers, executives, and others who can afford such assistance. Typically, a person who utilizes such an assistant is someone whose time is valuable and someone who wishes to minimize unnecessary distractions. To this end, personal assistants typically control the traffic of incoming and outgoing telephone calls. For example, an assistant can be given a list of persons to contact and asked to reach each person one at a time and hand over successful calls to the assistant's supervisor.
Utilizing a personal assistant poses a tradeoff between maintaining a supervisor's privacy and increasing the assistant's effectiveness. For example, having an assistant sit in a supervisor's office makes the assistant very effective but breaches the supervisor's privacy. On the other hand, having the assistant sit outside the supervisor's office serves to better protect the supervisor's privacy but makes the assistant less effective. This tradeoff becomes more pronounced when the supervisor must be out of the office. The supervisor must choose between traveling with the assistant so that the assistant can be very effective and having the assistant remain at the office where the assistant is likely to be less effective.
Typically, most people cannot afford to employ a personal assistant or are reluctant to do so for various other reasons. Accordingly, personal assistants are rare. Furthermore, even when real personal assistants are employed, they exhibit numerous shortcomings. For example, when calls between a supervisor and a destination becomes unexpectedly terminated due to a lossy signal, power outage, or other interruptions of service, the supervisor must manually update the personal assistant of the unexpected interruption so that the personal assistant can at a later time attempt to connect the supervisor with the destination again. Additionally, maintaining and tracking different lists of destinations, which can be reused at a later time, can be burdensome when changes to such lists must be coordinated between the supervisor and the personal assistant. Accordingly, utilizing a real personal assistant can be cumbersome and incomplete. The end result is that most people allocate some or a lot of their own attention to call traffic control. For example, a person who does not utilize a personal assistant but wishes to be connected with numerous destinations will likely have to dial repeatedly until each destination becomes available.
One area where call initiation has been automated is in the field of call center technology. U.S. Pat. No. 5,341,412 to Ramot et al. entitled “Apparatus And A Method For Predictive Call Dialing” and U.S. Pat. No. 5,815,566 to Ramot et al. entitled “Apparatus And Method For Dynamic Inbound/Outbound Call Management And For Scheduling Appointments,” which are hereby incorporated by reference in their entireties, describe an automatic dialer that performs “predictive dialing” to a list of destinations and hands-off each answered call to one of several idle representatives. The underlying assumption of this technique is that whenever a call is answered, an idle representative is able to take the call immediately, typically without having the destination wait for more than 1-2 seconds. Since this technique assumes that one of multiple callers is immediately available to connect with an available destination, this technique does not address the needs of a single caller wishing to connect with multiple destinations.
An individual caller cannot utilize such aforementioned techniques employed by call centers without modification since an individual caller must singularly receive all calls and since an individual caller is unlikely to be idle and immediately available to connect with each destination at every instance when a destination is available.
Another area where call initiation has been automated is in the field of predictive personal dialers, which perform a sequence of calls from a telephone directly and adjacently connected to a computer system. Just like the predictive dialing techniques employed by call centers, predictive personal dialers assume that the caller is nearby and immediately available to take a call when a destination answers. Hence, such systems are essentially for a stationary caller who is immediately available to take a call.
Accordingly, what is needed is a system and method that is tailored to allow a single caller who may not always be connectable, such as when the caller is on the move, to connect to a sequence of calls with multiple destinations.